Hugh Gaitskell showed great courage in leading and organizing a nationwide campaign against Suez. He was an obvious target for the Conservative press, who were loyally supporting their Prime Minister, for, as past history since the Boer War has shown, calm statesman-like criticism of a government's action during a war is quickly branded as treachery and a betrayal of HM forces.

We all took part in the operation, christened the 'Law not War' campaign. At one Shadow Cabinet meeting I reminded my colleagues of the occasion during the Boer War (when the Liberal Opposition was split on the issue) that Lloyd George had had to be smuggled out of Birmingham Town Hall disguised as a policeman to save his life. I said that I hoped that the luck of the draw would not lead to my being sent to Birmingham.

I was, in fact, sent there. The main hall was packed, as was a smaller hall which was linked to the platform by a public address system. Roy Jenkins, himself a Birmingham MP, rightly accused the Government of causing "enormous damage" to the chances of success of the simultaneous Hungarian revolt against Russia "for the sake of a squalid adventure in the Middle East". In fact, I did not have to don police uniform and, together with Roy, was cheered to the echo.

In my view, Roy Jenkins's best period in office was as Home Secretary in the Cabinet of 1966; he then succeeded in stamping his liberal humanism on a department not notorious for that quality. He was not well suited to the politics of class and ideology which played so large a role in the Labour Party. His natural environment was the Edwardian age on which he wrote so well. He saw politics very much like Trollope, as the interplay of personalities seeking preferment, rather than, like me, as a conflict of principles and programmes about social and economic change.

Though his father had been a miners' agent in South Wales, who served as Attlee's Parliamentary Private Secretary, Roy's drawling voice, his pronunciation of 'r' as 'w', and his sometimes lackadaisical manner limited his appeal to the Party activists. Yet he was a brilliant Parliamentary debater, and could rouse enthusiasm even in the Labour Party Conference when he spoke on a subject like the Common Market, on which he was passionately committed. He had the same capacity as Nye Bevan and Hugh Gaitskell to inspire a deep and personal devotion among his disciples.

Former Labour Chancellor and Home Secretary Lord Jenkins of Hillhead has died, aged 82. He collapsed at his home in Oxfordshire on Sunday morning, a spokeswoman for his family said.

After serving twice as home secretary in a Labour Government, Lord Jenkins was one of the "Gang of Four" who formed the breakaway SDP party in 1981.

Former Labour Prime Minister Lord Callaghan said: "He was one of the outstanding statesmen of his era."

Lord Owen, a co-founder of the SDP, said: "He was by any standards a major political figure and historical figure in the context of the last century."

Conservative leader Iain Duncan Smith said: "He was a big political figure and his passing is a sad moment."

Liberal Democrat leader Charles Kennedy said: "Roy Jenkins was a great man and a great personal friend."

Roy Jenkins was one of the most remarkable people ever to grace British politics. His influence on it is as great as many who held the office of Prime Minister. He had intellect, vision and an integrity that saw him hold firm to his beliefs of moderate social democracy, liberal reform and the cause of Europe throughout his life.

Even those of us who disagreed with the decision to form the SDP admired the way he never wavered from the view that the British people should have the chance to vote for a progressive politics free from rigid doctrine and ideology and one that stood in the tradition of Lloyd George, Keynes and Beveridge as much as Keir Hardie, Attlee and Bevan.

He was a friend and support to me and someone I was proud to know as a politician and as a human being. As his brilliant biographies demonstrate he had extraordinary insight and a naturally unprejudiced mind. He was above all a man of reason. I will miss him deeply.

The son and grandson of miners, raised in the South Wales coalfield - his trade union father was actually imprisoned during the General Strike of 1926 - Jenkins had an impeccable Labour pedigree. It was of the sort romantic class warriors from Hampstead and Holland Park such as Left-wing Labourites Michael Foot and Tony Benn would have given their eye-teeth for.

But from the very start, he never attempted to play on his background. At Oxford University, friends urged him to make more of it when standing for office in the Union, but he refused. "The poor are poor," he told them. He didn’t want "any sob-stuff" to promote his cause. He would not act up to the part.

All his adult life, he indulged in expensive pleasures, delighted in high-born company and presented an air of lordly entitlement. As a Labour politician (until he defected to the SDP), this left him open to charges of hypocrisy and betraying his roots. He didn’t care. He was what he was, and that was that.

His origins, anyway, were less horny-handed than many imagined from his Welsh valley roots. His father had been a miner, certainly, but there was never any question of his son following him down the pit. By the time Roy was born in 1920, Arthur Jenkins was already a full-time union official on a middle-class salary, chairman of the Pontypool Labour Party and a county councillor.

When Roy was 14, Jenkins Snr was elected MP for Pontypool. He quickly became Parliamentary Private Secretary (PPS) to the party leader, Clement Attlee, and held that position throughout World War II when Attlee was deputy Prime Minister. He was then briefly a minister in the Labour government that triumphed in the 1945 election.

Arriving at Oxford University from lowly Abersychan County School in South Wales in 1938, Roy Jenkins acquired a new accent - that distinctive and rather posh drawl that was to be the delight of impressionists in years to come. His ‘Rs’ came out as ‘Ws’, and the sound he made was such that a fellow undergraduate took him for an Old Etonian peer’s son.

It wasn’t the only significant change in him. The miner’s son brushed up against young men from public schools, most notably Tony Crosland - ‘the most exciting friend of my life’ - with whom he would be intimately entangled for the next 38 years in a relationship that was both personal and political.

The young Crosland was a striking figure, 15 months older than Jenkins and a year ahead of him at Oxford. He was from the Home Counties, his father a senior civil servant, his mother an academic.

‘Tony was immensely good-looking and elegant,’ Jenkins recalled. ‘He wore a long camel-hair overcoat, and drove a powerful MG sports car known as the Red Menace. I found him rather intimidating, until he came to my rooms on some minor Labour Club business and remained talking for nearly two hours. Thereafter, I saw him nearly every day.’
Crosland at this time in his life was openly gay - it was part of his slightly dangerous glamour - and part of Roy’s attraction for him was probably sexual. There is a strong homoerotic undercurrent in his letters. Years later, Roy confessed that Tony had successfully seduced him at least once.

As Home Secretary in the Sixties, Jenkins would become a driving force behind the decriminalisation of homosexuality, but he himself was not by nature gay - far from it, as his string of mistresses later in life showed. But he fell for a time so wholly under Crosland’s spell that he might have tried anything.

In one of their first letters when both were at their respective homes in Pontypool and Sussex for Christmas, Crosland teasingly likened his ‘boy friend’ to a ‘handsome (& pansy) Beau Geste’ and warned him not to forget that ‘drink, women and sleep are all things to be taken in small quantities!’

In the early days of their relationship Jenkins was clearly the junior partner. The more confident Crosland embraced an upper-middle-class form of socialist politics that was at once cerebral and romantic, egalitarian and elitist.